Asking For It
by Anticipating Boxes
Summary: AU, Angelface universe. Insomnia leads to murder, to interesting experiences, and eventually to breakfast. Or something like that.


**Notes**: So I actually intended to start writing the fourth full-length story in the Angelface 'verse... Instead I got this, which doesn't mesh with the rest of the story at all. And because of that, it gets it's own feature.

This story is set sometime after _Shrapnel_. It's not necessary to read the other stories first, though I do recommend it.

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Early morning sun shone through the trees, turning the ground into a tapestry of dappled light and dark greens, earthy brown where feet had trampled the dirt flat and worn away the grass. For now the park benches were in the shade, but in a few hours time the sun would rise enough to peek over the trees and warm the wood of the benches.

Right now the park was empty. Six in the morning was too early for everyone but the morning joggers. Health-conscious freaks who wore colour-coordinated tracksuits or tiny shorts and overlarge sweatshirts, some carrying sports drinks in water bottles with brand-name logos. Most of them had headphones on, iPods or tiny clip-on mp3 players set to the boppiest tracks their owners could find. It was good music to run to. A perfect way to stay fit.

Dean had always found that kind of suburban jogger behaviour overly pretentious. The mentality that fitness required isotonic sports drinks and matching outfits was just stupid. When Dean went running he did it without the drink bottles and overly expensive sneakers.

He wasn't in the park to run.

In actual fact he was just walking, a foam cup of steaming coffee held in one hand, the other tucked into the pocket of his jacket. His new phone, a cheap plastic thing that barely does more than send and receive calls, is tucked into the pocket of his jeans. He has a .22 resting snugly at the small of his back, tucked under his belt, and a flick knife hiding in his jacket.

He wasn't in the park looking for a bit of violent fun either, but it payed to be prepared.

Insomnia was the culprit, the reason he was ambling slowly through this suburban park with a coffee from the only cafe in the area with staff insane enough to be up this early. The caffeine wasn't going to help him any, but by this point it wasn't as if it would hurt either. Besides, he'd need the extra boost in concentration for driving back to the motel. He'd started off in the car at three-thirty in the morning and had been walking since just after four.

As he came closer to the parking lot he started to frown. The peace of the morning was disturbed by the rustling of bushes and the muffled sound of someone trying to call for help. Dean recognised the sound - it was exactly the way a woman sounded when someone had their hand clamped across her mouth. He heard the jangle of a belt buckle and thought better of just leaving it alone.

Anyone stupid enough to nab someone in a public park was just asking for trouble.

Dean banked left and headed towards the shaking, whimpering clump of bushes. He reached behind him and pulled the handgun from his waistband. He waited until he was close enough for the sound of the safety being clicked off to carry, then aimed the gun at the man's back.

"Hey douchebag," Dean called lazily. The man actually looked up. "Tag."

The shot rang out unnaturally loud in the quiet of the morning. Startled, a flock of birds scattered from a nearby clump of trees. The man, jeans still around his knees, toppled to the side with a hole through the side of his head and a shocked expression on his face.

Dean sipped his coffee.

Exactly two seconds later a young woman tumbled from the bushes, her pink hoodie ripped at the shoulder and covered in dirt and leaves. Her face was red, eyes wide and watery, mouth bitten and bloody. From the looks of things she'd only just pulled her bike shorts back up over her hips. She looked shell-shocked, and Dean was pretty sure she'd start shaking any second now.

When she looked at him - and at the pistol still held casually in his hand - she froze. Then exploded. "Oh my God! You just...! I don't even know... If you hadn't come along and...!"

"Lady," Dean replied. "Shut your mouth."

"I should call the police!"

"Ah, fuck."

"An ambulance. Oh God! He's dead. He was going to rape me and now he's dead!"

"I'm not in the mood for this shit."

"Are you a cop?" The woman asked suddenly, her eyes as wide as dinner plates. "Were you on patrol? I knew there were rumours of attacks in this park, but...! Oh God, if you hadn't come along!"

"I'm leaving." Dean turned on his heel and started walking again, taking a large gulp of coffee to keep from cussing the woman out when she started to follow him. After fifty metres he stopped again and glared at her. "What?"

Sheepish, the woman crossed her arms and held them close to her body. She gave him a hopeful look. "Can you walk me to my house?"

"Oh for fuck's sake." Dean rolled his eyes. It was way too early for this. "Sure, why the hell not? On one condition," he added before she could start looking too relieved. "You call the cops and I shoot you in the face. Got it?"

The woman nodded franticly. She jogged a few steps to catch up to him and watched him from the corner of her eye. She made two aborted attempts at conversation before she got the picture and walked in silence, only speaking up to tell him whether to turn at this street or keep going.

"This is me," she said finally, stopping outside a white two storey house with a decorative iron fence and a spray of daffodils in the garden beds under the windows. "Would you like to come in?" She asked awkwardly. "I can make you a coffee or something, as a thankyou..."

By that time Dean had tossed his empty styrofoam cup into a trash can along the way, and it was well past seven in the morning. Automatic, if sluggish, calculations of distance in his head told Dean that meant that it would have taken her at least twenty minutes to get to the park if she'd been running, and forty at a slow jog.

Dean was about to reply, most likely to tell her to keep her coffee, when his phone rang. "Just a minute," he said to her, then dug through his pockets until he found the phone. "Yeah?"

"Where are you?"

"Yeah, good morning to you too, Cas."

"Normally you're still asleep at this time."

"Couldn't sleep."

"You took the car. Therefore you're bringing breakfast back with you."

"You're bossy in the mornings, you know that? I just shot a guy and I'm an hour away from the damn car, ok? It's going to take a while."

"Should I tell your brother that we need to leave town?"

"Nah." Dean shook his head. "It's fine. Unless the girl squeals." He gave her a pointed look at that.

"Dean..." He can practically hear the disapproval, can see the lowered eyebrows and the incredulity in Castiel's ten-thousand-league eyes.

"We'll talk about it later," Dean said bluntly, then hung up and tucked the phone away.

It was only then that he noticed the way the woman was looking at him now. One part awe, one part 'what the fuck have I just stepped into'. Her face had gone bloodlessly pale as she stared at him. "Oh my God," she said quietly, breathlessly, "you're Dean Winchester."

He had to give her some credit for not squealing it aloud for the whole neighbourhood to hear. "You got a point you're going for?"

The woman covered her mouth with a hand. "Oh my God," she said, "Dean Winchester saved me from a rapist."

"How about that coffee?" Dean asked pointedly, giving her a look that clearly said she'd be wise to shut up about now.

"Um, yes. Right." She nodded. "Just, come right in." She fumbled at the door with her keys and he had to wonder what the hell she was thinking. Either she had decided that his shooting someone in front of her (no matter how convenient the timing) was cause enough to trust him or she was just plain stupid. She stopped half way through the door and turned back to tell him; "I'm Amanda, by the way."

"Amanda," Dean repeated. "You're standing in the middle of the door."

Startled, Amanda skipped ahead to let him inside and he shut the door behind him. He followed her into the kitchen, keeping his eyes peeled for signs that she didn't live alone. He found nothing to suggest that she had a roommate or boyfriend.

"Do you take sugar?" Amanda asked, already in the process of preparing coffee. "I've only got instant, I hope that's ok."

"Instant's fine."

"My father is in the FBI," she blurted suddenly. And flushed red when he looked at her. "He was on your case for a while, back in the nineties. That's how I recognised you, you look like your father."

"The Black Truck Killer," Dean provided. He walked through into the kitchen, blocking off the path to the phone hanging on the wall.

"Yeah." She nodded. "Milk?"

"Please."

"That," Amanda added, pouring a dash of milk into the coffee. "And when you were on the phone you said 'Cas'. I watch the documentaries sometimes, so I know what dad's talking about when he goes on about work." She handed him the cup and Dean took it with his left hand. "Cas is that guy who joined up with you and Sam a few years ago, Castiel."

"You're a ghoul," Dean said. He thought that might be the reason she wasn't running for the phone, or why her shock seemed to have died off in the time it took to walk from the park and back to her house. He relaxed a little, enough to move away from the phone and lean against her kitchen counter. "You're one of those weird chicks who likes hearing about serial killers. The girls who marry death row cons for kicks."

"I'm not going to call anyone, if you're worried about that."

"You know I'm not on the meat market, right?"

"I know," Amanda replied quickly. "You're gay."

"I'm not gay."

"... I thought Castiel was your boyfriend."

"Cas is my partner, not my boyfriend."

"But -"

"Are you seriously going to argue with me about this?" Dean gave her a look, incredulity in the arch of his eyebrows and the way his lips moved when he spoke. He was quietly impressed with the way all of the colour drained from Amanda's face, only to come back in a rush of red across her cheeks. The only other time he'd seen a reaction like that was in the first few seconds of someone choking to death.

"It's just that as far as anyone knows he's the only person you've ever been with," Amanda explained, as if that actually made things any better.

"Christ's Black Auntie," Dean muttered, beginning to feel an itch in his trigger finger. Louder, he asked; "Are you looking for a list of my conquests or something? You want a play-by-play of every girl I ever fucked?"

"I didn't mean to imply..."

"Lady, you implied." The experiment was rapidly losing its charm. Dean's right hand began inching towards his gun. He almost had the pistol in his hand before Amanda noticed.

"Are you going to kill me?" She blurted, eyes wide as she stared at him.

"Yeah," Dean replied honestly, withdrawing the gun again and taking the safety off. He didn't even put down his coffee. "It'll only get messy if you scream."

"Can I leave my dad a note?" Amanda asked. Then held up both of her hands. "No! Can you take a picture with me first? I've got a polaroid camera, it won't even take a minute."

"You are seriously fucked up." Dean considered for just a moment. It wasn't as if one more confirmed murder was going to make things any worse for him. If ever the police were lucky enough to somehow catch him and keep him long enough for a trial he was already set for a lethal injection. "Fine," he said finally, rolling his eyes, "where's the fucking camera?"

"It should be on the coffee table." Amanda pointed.

Despite the possibility that this was some kind of stupid ploy for her to try and get to the phone to call the cops, Dean looked. Sure enough, a blocky black camera sat innocently on the coffee table in her living room. When he looked back, Amanda hadn't gone for the phone. "So," Dean said, suddenly feeling strangely awkward, "where do you want to die?"

"Oh, the kitchen is fine."

"Stay there," Dean ordered. "Call the cops and I'll make it painful."

He put his coffee down on the counter and left her in the kitchen. The camera was old, but in good working condition. It was already loaded with film, and two snapshots of people who were probably her friends lay carelessly dropped to the floor. Dean didn't notice them until he stepped on one and it stuck to his sneaker.

He returned to the kitchen to find her exactly where he'd left her, waiting patiently by the sink. He stood beside her and slung his arm around her shoulder, gun pointed straight down at her breast; Took the photo with his left arm, myspace-style.

Thirty seconds later he shot her right between the eyes. He left the still-developing photo lying on the kitchen floor, away from the splatter of her blood.

The neighbourhood showed no signs of anyone having heard the gunshot. Nobody came out to look and Dean saw nobody peering from the windows as he walked away from the house, hands in his pockets.

An hour and a half later he arrived back at the motel, carrying a paper bag filled with hot cinnamon buns. "I got pastries," he said, shoving the bag at Castiel when the other man stood up to greet him.

"Dean." Despite the blank slate of his face, Dean could see the disapproval radiating from his lover. He knew what it was about too. Sam would have held the same opinion, had he not been in a different motel room and therefore as-yet unaware of Dean's morning murder.

"The girl's dead," Dean told him flatly. "So don't give me that look, ok? I think I just participated in my first assisted suicide."

Castiel tossed the bag of pastries onto the bed, uncaring of where it landed. He stepped forward and placed his hands on Dean's shoulders, then leaned in until their foreheads were touching. "Tell me what happened."

Dean shrugged. He placed his hands on Cas' waist, watched him lick his lips before he looked into Castiel's eyes. Fathomless blue stared back at him, waiting for the full explanation of Dean's absence. "I offed a guy in the park," Dean started, mincing no words, "walked home with the girl he was assaulting at the time, you called, turns out she knew who I was, I had coffee, then shot her in the face."

"You're not telling me everything."

"Sometimes I really hate how you do that."

Castiel kissed him. The kiss was long and hard, messy and deep. It ended with Dean's teeth biting down on Cas' lower lip, and Cas ran his tongue over the hurt before he spoke; "Then don't tell me."

"We'll have breakfast, then tell Sam we need to pack up and leave town. She wanted a photo with me before I shot her, I figure it was something meant to really fuck with her dad's head."

"Sam won't like that."

"Sam can suck my cock."

"Does it make you feel strange to have killed someone who wanted it?"

Dean smiled. "Call me old fashioned, Cas. I like my killing without consent issues. I mean, there's asking for it and then there's _asking for it_. And that's just fucking creepy."


End file.
